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Vladimir Putin Just Bought a Country. Should the U.S. Care?

How much does it cost to buy a country? Ask Vladimir Putin. He just got a great deal on one. For $15 billion in loans, a steep discount off Russia’s regular gas price this freezing winter and who knows what other undisclosed terms, Putin on Tuesday cemented his pact with Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. It’s the payoff for Yanukovych’s decision to turn Ukraine back east into Putin’s sphere of influence— and reject the painstakingly negotiated accession agreement to the European Union he was supposed to sign a couple weeks ago. Der Spiegel calls this Ukrainian maneuver the capstone of Putin’s “most successful year yet.”

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Of course, there’s the matter of the 45 million Ukrainians themselves, who overwhelmingly oppose this sellout by their president and have taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands to demand a future for Ukraine in the West.

In doing so, they’ve once again made poor Ukraine, with its disastrous economy, toxic corruption and dangerous proximity to a Russia that’s never fully given up imperial claims to its territory, into a geopolitical fault line, pitting the crass ambition (and attractive payouts) of Putinism against the nobler sentiments (and tough-love economic prescriptions) of the European Union and the IMF.

Nobody on either side of this fight is under any illusions about the broader stakes involved.

“It’s about Russia. It’s about Putin’s desire to restore his influence in the near abroad, the old portions of the Soviet Union that were lost,” says Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). McCain, an implacable critic of Putin’s, was just off the plane after a weekend visit to the chanting crowds in Kyiv, and he told me his appearance in front of 200,000-plus protesters Sunday in the main square now known as the Euromaidan was “one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.” When the Ukrainian pop star whose song “Stena”—“Wall” —has become the unofficial anthem of the uprising roared from the stage, “Jump if you don’t like Russia,” the response, McCain said, was “200,000 people jumping up and down all at once.”

If McCain was dazzled by the people power in the square, so was another Putin foe who showed up in solidarity: former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. When I spoke with him after his own star turn addressing the protesters (in Ukrainian no less, learned during his Soviet university days there), Saakashvili was insistent that, no matter what the short-term outcome, the massive demonstrations marked a decisive rebuke of Putin and turn to the West, a choice by the people of Ukraine if not their leaders to pivot to Europe.

“It’s a geopolitical revolution,” he said, “because people there are shouting ‘Europe, Europe’ and basically they’re extremely anti-Russian…. It’s irreversible in terms of geopolitical orientation, [and] in the mood of the people it’s totally irreversible…. People associate poverty, mismanagement and corruption with Russia.” In many ways, he argued, it was about Putin overplaying his hand. “What Russia attempted to do,” he said, “was hijack a big, promising European country basically on the way to Brussels.”

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But, if anything, talking with Saakashvili was a reminder of why it’s a mistake to put too much faith in people power in the former Soviet Union, a part of the world where rigged institutions and naked power politics often conspire to restore a status quo that leaves the people out of the equation entirely.

Just a decade ago, Saakashvili was the hopeful archetype of post-Soviet people power, boosted to office by the Rose Revolution in his country after protesting a rigged election. That revolution and the Orange Revolution Saakashvili inspired the next year in Ukraine against the fraudulent installation of Yanukovych, the Kremlin-backed candidate, earned him the eternal enmity of Putin. Putin even invaded Georgia during his tenure, though he failed to immediately dislodge the pesky Saakashvili. That was left to the Georgians themselves, who finally turned on Saakashvili after 10 rocky years during which Saakashvili allied his country with the United States, tried and failed to join NATO, and enacted a broad reformist agenda while also earning a reputation as an autocrat in training. Now out of office and not returning home to Georgia for fear of arrest (it’s not exile, he insists: “I told my people they need a break from me,” he told me by phone from New York, where he had flown after his Ukraine trip. “I was too much for too long.”), Saakashvili struck me as a chastened figure, no longer making revolutions but cheering on those of others.

Perhaps the most telling moment of this Ukrainian uprising happened not long after Saakashvili’s visit to the protesters, when they finally managed to topple an old statue of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. To many outside Ukraine, the surprise wasn’t that they took down Lenin, but that this icon of the Russian revolution was still holding court over Kyiv all these years after the Soviet collapse. The symbolism certainly wasn’t lost on Vladimir Putin.

But if the Kyiv uprising is all about Russia and its resurgent big-footing, why has Washington been so silent?

At first, it seemed like a mess to be resolved between the European Union and the Ukrainians; the Obama administration, I’m told, reasoned that it would certainly not help matters by turning the dispute into yet another U.S.-Russia confrontation. Even Saakashvili, often a critic of Obama’s, was mostly fine with it. “What happened,” he said, “is the European Union started to fill the vacuum.”

But when thousands of Ukraine’s security forces were unleashed on the protesters last week in an unsuccessful attempt to clear the square—and it came right in the midst of a high-level visit by Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, photographed handing out cookies and sandwiches to the peaceful crowds—U.S. rhetoric suddenly got a lot tougher, and there was Secretary of State John Kerry expressing official “disgust” at the move. Russian state media upped the ante too, deeming the Kyiv uprising a “coup d’état,” financed and directed by Western meddlers like Nuland and her EU counterparts.

But there’s been no word from President Obama himself, and nor is there likely to be anytime soon. From the start of his presidency, Obama has been decidedly realistic about his dealings with the Russians, preferring to do business with them when possible (remember the vaunted Russia “reset”?) and steer clear of the finger-wagging lectures that often characterized American reaction to Russian misdeeds.
To critics of Obama’s foreign policy, Ukraine 2013 will very likely be added to the long list of places where America is pulling back in the world. And that is exactly what McCain said to me when we talked after his visit to the protest. “Certainly Putin’s been encouraged by our lack of reaction to many things he’s done,” McCain argued. “We have to re-engage every place in the world, whether here or in Japan, South Korea or throughout the Middle East,” he said. “We’ve got to re-engage in the world. It doesn’t mean conflict. It does mean exercising leadership, which only the U.S. can provide.”

But I think this isn’t so much about some global Obama strategy of disengagement. The debate about whether Ukraine matters is better seen, perhaps, as part of the long-running debate over Vladimir Putin and just what he’s really up to.

Certainly, there’s little argument that Putin has spent much of 2013 as the world’s foremost America annoyer. Between stealing a march on the United States to cut a chemical weapons deal that seems to have left Russian client Bashar Assad indefinitely in charge in Syria and offering NSA leaker Edward Snowden temporary asylum, Putin has had a banner year of it. (Not to mention that he displaced Obama from the top of Forbes’s most powerful person in the world list.)

Just because Obama doesn’t complain about Putin, though, doesn’t mean he isn’t peeved.

On Tuesday, Obama may not have had anything to say about Ukraine’s protesting crowds, dreaming of a European future and appalled by the Kremlin intrigues of their embattled leader. He may not have mentioned Viktor Yanukovych, or EU accession agreements or the price of gas Russia sells to its neighbors.

But he did take the opportunity to make a major diplomatic snub of his own, when it was announced that the president, the first lady and all his top officials would be skipping the Sochi Olympics that are meant to be a crowning glory of Putin’s long career. Obama didn’t say anything publicly about it, or about the in-your-face substitution of two openly gay athletes in the U.S. delegation, a move clearly meant to embarrass the Russian president for the virulently anti-gay laws he pushed through; he didn’t have to.